Shit that Pissed me Off – 2/16/18

Jon Standard is a Utah politician who, like a lot of other Utah Politicians, is a Mormon and a Republican. He believes that “traditional” marriage should be between one man and one woman (but that’s only because the Mormon church no longer encourages bigamy) and recently helped pass tougher laws for people who solicit prostitutes.

He was forced to resign last week because he solicited a prostitute. He claims it is because his father has cancer and I feel very bad for his father because this jackass is using someone else’s terminal disease as an excuse.

John Wayne had cancer. Maybe he should have stepped down because of John Wayne’s cancer.

I’m sure that the right is going to say this one Mormon Republican lawmaker in an extremely conservative state who is likely to be replaced by another Mormon Republican lawmaker is being targeted for a hit job by this prostitute who is lying because she’s a prostitute and you can’t trust a prostitute.

I mean, she says he hired her to do a job and she did it so I’m feeling like she’s pretty reliable, you know?

Oh, and he may have used taxpayer funds to pay for the hotel where he hooked up with her. Smaller government!

Hey – speaking of Utah! A Utah school has a policy for their school dance meant to help kids with their self esteem. If another child asks them to dance, they must say yes.

I mean never mind if the child has social anxiety disorder or the child doing the asking is a bully looking to terrorize someone or the child is a young woman being taught that saying “no” to a boy just isn’t OK.

What’s amazing about this story is the fact the school says, basically, nobody has ever had a problem with this policy before. Why not???

I mean seriously, why not? While the policy is unquestionably worse for girls who are already being conditioned to think that saying “no” is wrong, it is bad for every child in that school.

I mean, I get it that some kids are really shy and are going to be devastated if they ask someone to dance and that someone says no. I get that some kids would never in a million years even ask.

There are also some kids (I am the father of one of them) who would be horrified by the idea of having to dance with anyone. If my child’s school had this policy, he wouldn’t go to the dance.

Yeah – he’s not going to the dance anyway.

I just think the school’s response to this criticism shouldn’t be “nobody has ever complained before” but rather “holy shit – this policy is horrible – how is it nobody has ever complained before?”

Kevin Sorbo is an Insufferable Prick

I’ve written about Sorbo before. He is a conservative and a Christian and while neither of those things alone guarantee one will be an asshole, combining them certainly seem to up the odds. Sorbo has opinions and he shares them. Most of them are inane. This week, he tweeted the following:

Now a few things piss me off about this tweet, including the fact it has over two thousand likes. I’ll bet one of them is Kirk Cameron.

But listen, Kevin. Can I call you Kevin? I’m going to call you Kevin because I think it’s more polite than calling you a clueless asshole.

I could get on you about the way your comment about Dreamers is really racist and you should go fuck yourself, Kevin, but let’s just stick with the first part of the tweet, OK?

The label “racist” and “Nazi” applies to people (like you) who are racists and/or Nazis. Their immigration status is irrelevant. In fact, you may recall that over the years, people who have legally immigrated to the United States were eventually revealed to have been Nazis in World War II.

They weren’t mislabelled, were they? They were actually Nazis, right?

And there are a lot of members of the KKK who were born right here in America and can trace their family all the way back to the Civil War (or even further) who are definitely racist, right?

I mean, who exactly are you defending, Kevin? The people chanting “Blood and Soil” in Charlottesville? Or our President the sexual predator? Whose side is god on, Kevin?

I’d like to believe that god is on the side of the people who aren’t racists and Nazis and doesn’t really give a shit about their immigration status. But you’re the expert, Kevin. You tell me.

Under the “How our current President proposes to do actual harm is an even bigger problem than the fact he’s a bully and a sexual predator” category of what’s fucked up about the current state of American Politics, we have the newest proposal for gutting the SNAP Program.

First, we need to understand that food stamps are a minuscule part of the Federal budget. Next, we need to understand that the primary beneficiaries of this program are children. Good? OK.

So the Trump budget suggests we replace half of the annual benefit poor families receive with boxes of food including shelf stable milk (which just sounds kind of gross) and canned fruits and vegetables. The idea is this will cut down on the cost of the program in which recipients currently receive a card that is loaded with points on a monthly basis.

And yes – I’m oversimplifying.

Reportedly, this is intended to reduce the cost of the program although I can’t see how since someone is going to need warehouse space to store the shelf stable milk and someone will have to pay to ship it. But I’m guessing that the budget suggests states can pay for this service (or not), which erases it from the federal ledger.

Thing is, Congress isn’t going to cut the food stamp program because they’ll look like pricks. But every time the Trump Administration proposes cutting it, they get people to talk about how awful this program that doesn’t cost very much and feeds underprivileged kids is.

This budget item isn’t about cutting the SNAP program this year. It is about cutting the SNAP program five years from now. When you’ve managed to convince enough people that spending money on another tank is more important than feeding poor children.

Seventeen people died in Florida this week when a troubled nineteen-year-old ex-student opened fire. In the wake of this event, people are talking about gun control and mental illness and the sensationalization of violence and the warning signs this young man displayed before going on his killing spree. Everyone is pointing fingers and trying to blame something.

You know what everyone is going to do?

Nothing.

Because the NRA has turned the narrative about these shootings into an argument over mental health vs. guns. Our President says that this is a mental health issue (even though the data says that’s wrong) but even if he really believes that, he hasn’t done a single thing to deal with that issue.

In fact, his current budget cuts funding for those with mental illness as well as cutting programs meant to make schools safer.

The point here is that the right only cares about mental illness when they are trying to draw attention away from gun control.

This is David Copperfield. He’s a famous magician. He could learn something about misdirection from these assholes.

Will gun control help?

Hell, I don’t know. My friends who are massively pro-gun say no but with all due respect to those friends, of course they say that. They believe they have a right to any gun under any circumstance and no matter the situation, they are not going to be swayed from that belief.

But look – the idea that no single law will prevent these shootings from occurring is a fallacy because nobody is passing any laws at all. How does anyone know if any of these laws will help?

Besides, if I could prove conclusively that a law would prevent 10% of mass shootings, I’d get told that wasn’t worth doing because 90% of them would still happen and if it isn’t a 100% solution, what’s the point in trying?

I mean, there were red flags for this kid. He was a member of a white supremacist group, which is problematic. But what do you do? Arrest the kid for being more openly racist than our President?

Is the solution to just put every kid who expresses violent thoughts on Facebook into jail? I mean, we all know we can’t do that. But maybe we should. Because while most of these kids (like most people who own guns and most people who are mentally ill) aren’t a threat to anyone but possibly themselves, why take the risk, right?

Of course that’s wrong. Just as it is wrong to suggest we curtail the freedom of the press just because we don’t like reading about mass shootings.

So in the end, we will do nothing except argue over which something to do. We blame mental illness (which is bullshit) or we blame gun culture or we blame the press or we argue that it is a false flag conspiracy because fuck some people.

But in the end, blame is all we will ever do. It seems like that’s all we are good at.